


Little Moth

by antlover



Category: Druck | SKAM (Germany)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Canon Trans Character, Dysfunctional Family, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Friends to Lovers, Healing, M/M, Unspecified Mental Illness, carlos is bisexual bc i said so, really minor carlos/matteo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-03-09 04:19:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18909424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antlover/pseuds/antlover
Summary: In the shower, Matteo runs his palms over his hips and pretends his hands are not his hands. The wet skin is still his, the dips and the bones and it’s still him. He closes his hands and acts like the touch is David’s, although this is a secret, a thing he won’t admit or say aloud.And how his hands are strong and their grip awfully mean until it hurts.





	Little Moth

**Author's Note:**

> college au only in spirit and age nothing happens in school at all.   
> cw: tags + religion, childhood neglect, a lot talk abt hands bc im crazy and obsessive and this is called projecting. ENJOY!

  
  
  


Matteo’s first memory is from when he was seven years old, blurred and inexplicably unsure, and as the years pass by, he isn’t all too sure whether the memory is real or just something he came up with in the dim behind his skull.

It’s him sitting on the edge of a big mattress, legs hanging off the bed, he swinging them. It’s him staring at the brown spots on the wall, curious and intimidated, he doesn’t know where the discolouration is from, he doesn't know what it means and if it means anything at all. In all honesty, Matteo doesn’t remember these things when he is older, the details and frizzy, odd feelings.

What he remembers for sure, if anything of this is real, is his mother sitting on the bed beside him. It creaks loudly. She puts her arm around him and she is awfully, uncomfortably warm against him. When she speaks, it sounds like static screen in Matteo’s ears, lulling him into sleep in the bright and sunny mid of the day. 

  
  
  
  


Matteo comes to love winter when he is older, despite how it makes his nose runny and red, and lets his skin crack on his knuckles and the backs of his hands. 

“You should moisturize,” David tells him, looking disapprovingly down to his hands where they are gloveless, holding a takeaway cup of coffee from a kiosk. Matteo looks down too, the skin irritated and red. 

“I do moisturize,” he tells him. He doesn’t. “I try to moisturize,” he corrects himself. The cream he has is an expensive brand from the pharmacy but Matteo didn’t even buy it for himself—he took it from his dad’s bathroom cabinet when he was visiting him two months ago. 

“Try harder,” the end of David’s words falls under the squeak of snow when he steps forward on the ground. Matteo chuckles. 

“Okay.” 

“I mean it! Your hands look ugly like that,” he teases. It’s not as annoying as it could be, or maybe Matteo is just used to it, like he is used to his hands looking painful and gross. He shrugs his shoulders. 

“Okay.” 

David groans, making Matteo’s lips curl into a smile. 

“Your passive ass,” he mumbles. Matteo shrugs again.

“What can I do?”

It’s a rhetoric question because Matteo doesn’t need David to tell him. He doesn’t need him to explain into his ear and try to care for him like this, but that sounds all too depressing in the dark afternoon of winter’s shortest day. David is an exception to many things, anyway. 

“Carlos asked about you again,” David changes the subject, “can you  _ please _ get in contact with him before he bites my head off?” 

He sounds desperate. It’s oddly humouring. 

“You shouldn’t be our message boy,” he says instead of answering. 

“Yeah, but only because you won’t deal with him.”

“I will. Just for you,” Matteo tries to make it sound like a sleazy joke but it comes out scarily more like something he means. He doesn’t. 

David huffs. His breath comes out as a cloud in the cold air. It’s mesmerizing. His cheeks are flushed from the cold. Matteo sniffs. Runny nose. 

“You better.”

“I will.”

Somewhere, under Matteo’s skin something hot roars. It’s the blood in his veins, of course, because underneath his skin there’s nothing but biology. He is nothing but biology. A fleshy, bloody, bony, veiny thing. Looking at his hands, he sees the bones. He sees what is under the skin.

Somewhere, under all of this, there’s a chaos. The chaos gets worse with every promise he makes and eases with the every promise he breaks. 

Matteo knows he won’t contact Carlos. He is a coward like that. 

  
  
  
  


Matteo wants David’s hands.

There is never anything extraordinarily memorable about hands, or the way the work. Fingers, palms, the backs of them, knuckles, the spaces in between…

There’s something about David’s, though. Or maybe it’s just him where the answer lays, and not his hands. Matteo fixates on his hands despite all of this, perhaps because it’s easier, maybe because it doesn’t make much sense and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t have to mean anything. It’s easy to have the whole universe to boiled down just to a pair of fleshy palms.

So, he wants David’s hands. To hold, in some alternate universe. In this universe Matteo ruins everything he gets on his fingers on, it’s too risky to hold David or his hands, it could end up with bones just scattered pieces, blood all over the place, and pained moans of utter terror, and who wants to be the villain if there’s a chance to be a just standby?

Many people, but Matteo isn’t one of them.

To lay in his bed and think of the way David’s hands would fit against his, it feels almost like a sin. Closer than almost. 

This doesn’t make much sense.

Go figure.

  
  
  
  
  


”You didn’t call him?” 

”I don’t like calls.”

”You could have texted him.”

”I guess.”

Matteo looks away so he doesn’t have to see the potential worry or desperation in David’s eyes. It’s too early for this, and David has recently been too straightforward with his words. Matteo laps his tongue against his lower lip and turns his head, but doesn’t meet his eyes.

Underneath the yellow light of the Chinese restaurant three blocks away from Matteo’s apartment, David looks like a doll and the image of God in the same time. On the squeaky leather seat of the fairly empty room, David shifts for a reason Matteo doesn’t know, and doesn’t care to because it still doesn’t matter. It doesn’t stop him from noticing it.

”Your hair is dirty,” he says instead. The grease shines under the yellow. David grimaces. 

”I bought new shampoo and it doesn’t fucking work,” David says. 

What he could have said, or meant, is that he hasn’t washed his hair in five days because showering is a painfully dull and pointless task, and an impossible one when there’s restlessness and fatigue set deep in his bones the concept of reality shifts and keeps shifting into how it’s a waste. 

What he could have said, or meant, is that the shower in his apartment is broken and he doesn’t bother to ask his friends to shower at their places, so he does it at the dance studio or the gym, but keeps forgetting his shampoo at home. He puts a reminder into his phone but he still forgets. He writes it on the back of his hand and still forgets. He puts it on his desk to be visible at all times but still forgets. 

What he could have said, or meant, is that he is cutting off shampoo, and shower gel, and deodorant, and cologne, and toothpaste, and all personal hygiene products, and Matteo can’t come up with a hypothetical reason for this.

But because it’s David, it’s most likely how his new shampoo is fucking shit. Matteo has always been one for the dramatics, just behind the safety of his skull, for being too cowardly to express them aloud. That’s most likely for the best.

Matteo thinks and imagines and wonders and plays with the ideas of things falling apart just to fall to their places, respective or out of order, just to keep his hands clenched to fists because he is a cowardly man. 

Something ugly pulls him apart in the pit of his stomach when David purses his lips to emphasize an expression Matteo can’t describe.

”Just use too much of it each time so you’ll run out quickly,” Matteo says the first thing that comes to his mind. Now it’s David who shrugs.

”I guess. It’s not like I can do anything else about it.”

Matteo just nods. Thinks about how David could come over and use his shampoo and smell like him, and how easy it would be to pretend they mean actually something. It’s easier to keep his mouth shut about this. There’s no air between his lips.

  
  
  
  


In the shower, Matteo runs his palms over his hips and pretends his hands are not his hands. The wet skin is still his, the dips and the bones and it’s still him. He closes his hands and acts like the touch is David’s, although this is a secret, a thing he won’t admit or say aloud.

And how his hands are strong and their grip awfully mean until it hurts. 

  
  
  
  
  


Matteo once asked Carlos about it.

”Do you ever think of ending the world? Like, not the doomsday but just… doing it yourself? Ruining the whole planet.” 

It’s vague enough but Matteo still plays it safe, looking over the railing instead of Carlos’s face.

”Is this a trick question?” Carlos asks back. He looks at him anyway, just to see the furrowed brows and a funny look. He thinks Matteo is ridiculous, or maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he thinks the question is utterly weird. 

”It’s for something I’m writing,” Matteo lies. Carlos runs his hand through his hair. There’s a half smoked joint between his index and middle finger, in his right hand. Matteo is on his left side so it’s not even visible unless he really looks. He doesn’t.

”I don’t,” Carlos says. He doesn’t explain it any further but he doesn’t need to—he doesn’t owe Matteo anything. 

”I see,” Matteo looks down from the balcony. 

 

When he asks David about it, half a year later, the answer isn’t much better.

”Do you?” 

Matteo looks down to the broken skin of his hands, where he hasn’t moisturized. 

”Sometimes,” he tells the truth. 

”Me too,” says David. 

Matteo isn’t sure what he expected to hear. 

  
  
  
  


Something unwinds, something rewinds, and suddenly Matteo is thirteen again. He is sitting on the same bed. It feels like a dream, baby blue and cloudy. The palm of his mother’s hand on his back is heavy and burning hot. 

Matteo can’t tell whether it’s a memory, a nightmare, or something else entirely. He doesn’t lean against her so she tugs him closer. Matteo’s cheek squishes against the soft of her collarbone. Maybe it’d crack if he came closer to her embrace, but would she deal with the cost. 

The smell of her perfume is sweet, flowery, lingering in the air like translucent dust. Matteo doesn’t dare to close his eyes so he closes his fists instead, and when his mother talks, the words lull into a tune. It doesn’t shut out the fire in his chest. 

“You need to stop acting like this,” she tells him.

“Okay.”

“I mean it. It’s hurting us.”

“Okay.” 

”Talk to God. He’ll help.”

”Okay.”

Matteo looks down to his hands, unclenches them, moves his fingers around. Sorry for hurting you and dad, he wants to say, but his tongue is heavy in his mouth. Sorry for ruining everything again, he thinks but doesn’t close his eyes.  _ God, if you are listening, please take this thing out of me. _

  
  
  
  


Carlos was a friend, maybe with benefits, but a friend nevertheless. A strange boyish charm, and even weirder innocence in his eyes, and sometimes Matteo would draw on the bare skin across his spine with his fingertip, and Carlos would swat his hand away and roll over on his back. His hair would be all messed around like a devilish halo of some sort, and Matteo would think he is beautiful. Most things are when he is high—or not, but bearable. Beautiful and bearable sound rather similar anyway.

David is something much more than that. Matteo doesn’t really know what he can compare him to. 

It’s something like this.

Matteo wants David, admitted in the dark of his bathtub. Matteo wants David and his hands and his lips and the way he moves and laughs and the bared teeth and tongue and—

Matteo ruins the things he loves. There’s no point in getting close if everything ends up as ghosts and faded memories, and the reputation of a stoned heartbreaker, or something pretentious like that. 

Perhaps it would work in a story. A protagonist with a broken soul barely working, damaged but he still carries himself beautifully, and bad hands that ruin things he touches. Someone would come, not to fix him, but make him realize there’s still something good within him. And it’d be hopeful, bittersweet but still, a light in the dark. 

In reality, it’s just awkward and embarrassingly sad, and a lot more lonelier than one would think, but vulnerability doesn’t sound as cool as an ice heart.

Matteo can’t stop wanting him, still. He can’t write a happy ending for himself, that’s easy to understand, but harder to accept. 

  
  
  
  


“I sent him a text,” Matteo stares past David to the wall behind him. 

“Oh?” 

“Mm.” 

“That’s good. What did you say?” 

“I apologized. Said that I’m not very good with whatever we were doing.”

“And he’s okay with it?”

“I mean, what can he do? Tell me to fight for it? He can’t do anything…” 

“That’s rough, isn’t it? Did he love you?”

“I don’t think so.” 

 

Carlos, sweet, ruthlessly cruel Carlos, with his  _ nice _ face. Matteo doesn’t know why it hurts when he didn’t really care for him like that. 

”Did you love him?” 

Matteo focuses his stare on David’s face, almost dumbfounded by the question. His face is morphed into a curious expression, lips parted, dark hair still looking greasy. And then it comes from Matteo’s mouth like vomit, quietly from the pit of his stomach.

”I love you.”

(Matteo doesn’t know if he loves him, really. If it’s just an infatuation or something to replace the wallowing emptiness his childhood left behind, desperate for something real or fake, anything will do, especially if it’s David. He isn’t sure what is so different with him.)

“I’m sorry,” Matteo adds, looking around. David just stands and something runs in his ears like the sound of static. 

  
  
  
  


She stands too close, and Matteo can’t stop thinking of all the things he has ruined. There’s wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, and Matteo can’t stop thinking of all the things he has ruined. 

“I missed you, love,” she says, ”you should call more.” Matteo can’t bring himself to respond with words so he just nods with a tight smile. Something sad flashes in her eyes and he barely catches it, but he does which is what matters. And then his shoes feel too big on his feet and his clothes are too baggy and he is just a child and it’s Christmas but it doesn’t feel like it at all. 

She doesn’t look too well but Matteo doesn’t want to ask about it. He doesn’t want to know the reason for it—he is selfish but more than that, he is scared, deep to the bone marrow. She isn’t bad, she isn’t good, something is always wrong and Matteo is sick of it. It’s shameful to say. 

He doesn’t know what to say or do so he shifts on his feet, bites on his inner cheek, grits his teeth.

”Come on, let’s go inside,” she tells him. Matteo nods but it feels like he is one of those wooden dolls with big heads that just keep nodding and nodding.

The home smells like his childhood. It’s a familiar terror. But he will pretend like it doesn’t exist, like it isn’t there, like he has forgotten it. Matteo likes to think he is good at pretending but no, he isn’t. He can’t act for shit—the face of stone is just an automatic reaction. In the mechanisms, how he works. It’s an awfully unconventional thing.

Matteo’s reactions, fight or flight, is almost always fleeing, escaping. He doesn’t deal with confrontation. 

This is why he hasn’t talked to David at all after he blurted  _ that _ out, after the break for holidays started. The thing is, Matteo knows the consequences of avoidance and how it will fuck him and others over, as it always does. As he does. Ruining things, fucking things up. It’s not a new occurrence, rather a pattern. Although Matteo will act like it’s not, and it will repeat, and it will keep repeating and he will keep thinking it’s not there. And it’ll be a contradiction, because the avoidance of avoidance just sounds funny. 

  
  
  


Matteo sees him in his dreams, sleeping in the hard bed of his childhood bedroom. 

The dreams aren’t extraordinarily special but that’s what makes them chilling, unnerving. They feel real. In his dreams, he meets David on a street. The asphalt is dark, like it’s rained on, but the air doesn’t smell like rain. 

David’s cheeks look flushed and his eyes are sad, disappointed, and he asks questions that sound like the crashing of waves in his ears. Matteo just keeps saying he doesn’t know and that he is sorry. He doesn’t know what sadness truly looks like on David’s face. He can’t remember it. 

Sometimes they lay on a field of bright green grass and are complete. 

In some of the dreams, they’re friends and Matteo never opened his mouth. He wishes he could have kept his mouth shut. 

  
  
  


(People create stories, people create art, some people create tornadoes and others metaphors. Matteo creates problems out of things that shouldn’t be. Making easy things into something painful and difficult, and he knows it’s his fault. 

David’s texts are very much worried, very much caring and _ nice.  _ Matteo doesn’t deserve nice. He doesn’t want to hear what David has to say because—because he just doesn’t want to. That’s all there is to it, he tells this to himself.)

  
  
  
  


_ I sought the Lord, and he answered me, and delivered me from all my fears.  _ The words glare back at Matteo from a small piece of paper stuck to the bathroom wall.  **_Psalm 34:4._ **

He knows his mother is difficult. Life is difficult for her. He feels guilty over feeling the way he does about her, about the way he was taught the ways of life. When there were any problems, he should’ve went to God, not to his mom. Or dad, for that matter, because in his love he was shut off. Careful. Wordless. Matteo inherited this. It’s easy to blame your parents for your flaws. 

Matteo can’t find solace in God, the Holy Bible, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Virgin Mary. He can’t find comfort in resting his head on a shoulder that he can’t see. He can’t believe that someone out there would let all of these horrible things to happen in the name of love. This isn’t love. Matteo sleeps with other men, he loves a man, he is sinful, greedy, selfish. And this isn’t love, or at least what it should be, when as a child he cried out of fear for Hell. When you are twelve, and you know what you’re feeling is inexplicably wrong and you just can’t stop — you know you are fated to be bad. 

  
  
  


A few days before the New Year’s eve, Matteo is sitting on a worn out armchair. The refrigerator is humming in one room away. His mother is humming a song he can’t recognize. The television is on, people who look like plastic talking about the world. It’s dark outside, it’s cold even when he’s wearing a woolen sweater. 

Matteo loves her, and he’s sure she loves him but it isn’t in a way he understands. 

The screen of his phone flashes blue in the dim light of the living room. Another message from David, short and sudden:  _ and btw, i’m a trans man. thought you should know. not that it should matter.  _

For a second his body feels numb, just before his heart rises to his throat like vomit, beating anxiously. 

“Mom,” he stares at the telly, “I’m gay.” 

The fight or flight response paralyzes him, a voice chanting in his head, telling him to get up, get up, flee and be safe. He can’t bring himself to look at her. He can just imagine that the rapid beating of a heart, sweaty palms, the panic, can’t be much better for David — David, who is always just so cool. It’s easier not to make a big deal out of things, not to go for the dramatics, just say it and be over it, but the consequences, oh God. It’s all just speculation, what does Matteo know? About David, about himself, about anything at all. He is so cold, but sweat is piling up under his shirt.

“Matteo, love,” her voice is soft, careful, “I’ve always loved you. I always will.”

But Matteo can’t understand the love of hers. He feels like crying, like really bursting out to tears, sobbing his heart out until he can’t breathe, and hug her. Like a child. 

  
  
  


Courage. A thing Matteo lacks. There’s not much else to say about it. 

Despite not being very good at it, and despite him neglecting most of the previous messages, he gathers up the thing he lacks so much just to type a simple message to David.  _ That’s okay. I’m coming back tomorrow.  _

  
  
  


Matteo doesn’t really want to talk about it. A bad habit, the avoidance. It’s an old song that goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on. 

They don’t actually meet until a few days after his return, on the 1st of January, to be exact. Another chilly day, another anxious heart, it’s getting to a point where all of his nervous ticks are piling on top of each other as a repetitive mess. 

”Sorry for leaving,” is the first thing Matteo blurts out, uncharacteristic, when David is in the hearing distance. His cheeks are rosy as always, a beanie covering his hair. 

”Don’t apologize, no one’s here for the holidays anyway. Where were you?”

”Over my mom’s,” Matteo looks down at his shoes. ”How was Christmas?”

He doesn’t like small talk, isn’t good at it, but it just feels inappropriate to stay silent. It’s the guilt. Sometimes he doesn’t get it, when he should speak up and when he shouldn’t, it’s awfully confusing. 

”Good. Look, let’s go get coffee. You’re acting weird,” again, David sounds gentle, ”which isn’t that rare.”

Matteo laughs softly and nods. It’s more of a chuckle than a laugh but it is something. He sort of just wants to hug him. Kiss him, maybe. But intimacy is hard and it probably wouldn’t be the best idea anyway, considering how David probably doesn’t like him, not like that. He despises the little flame of hope. 

 

Inside, sitting in the cozy atmosphere of the cafe, Matteo stirs the spoon in his cup of coffee for far too long. The uncomfortable itch of not knowing what to do or say is crawling on his skin as he looks past David’s shoulder. 

“We should probably talk about it, you know,” David says, some hesitance in his voice. Matteo keeps stirring his coffee as he nods, swallows nervously. 

“Yeah… Did you know that I love winter?” He watches the busy street behind the window, people dressed up in thick coats and scarves wrapped around their neck. Hiding in the comfort of layers of clothes. The summer brings only vulnerability with too much skin exposed, showing yourself as you are. No more lies. 

In his peripheral, he can see David shaking his head. 

“It’s too cold,” he says.  _ So am I,  _ Matteo thinks. 

“And during summer it’s too hot.”

“How ‘bout spring? Or autumn. A compromise.”

Matteo doesn’t know what to say. He shrugs his shoulders. 

“I suppose.” He’d rather go home and hide beneath a blanket. 

“Anyway,” David’s tone just demands attention so Matteo turns his gaze on him, although hesitant, “Love. You. Me.”

Matteo sort of wants to laugh at the ridiculous awkwardness of all of this. He drops his face in his hands, elbows propped against the table. 

“I like you, yeah, okay. I don’t know what else to say,” Matteo mumbles, “about anything.” About love or about dry hands or about David being trans or about God or about winter or spring or summer or autumn. He doesn’t want to talk.  _ Let’s just not talk, let’s go home and lay in bed, all of our clothes on, let’s pretend you love me too so I’m not such a fool. _

“Look at me?” David asks, not a command, but Matteo does so anyway. “See, some of us lost our teenage years being sad and closeted and now we’re dealing with shit we should’ve dealt at seventeen. I’ve never been in a relationship. I’ve never been in love.” He speaks quietly, sadly, not to bring any attention to himself, to them. “I don’t know how to do these things.”

And at his words, something inside Matteo’s chest cracks. It’s a familiar feeling, slipping down to his stomach, that  _ sadness. _ Partly for how lonely David must’ve been, alienated, strange, out of place, and more for how it sounds too familiar. Matteo looks down to his lap, at his dry hands. 

The strangest part must be how this is the moment he has felt the least lonely in a very long time. 

“We could learn together,” he shrugs, “I don’t know much either. I just really like you.” 

Matteo wishes he could hold his hand, but he still is a coward. And for a moment, it’s more than enough when David says, “I like you too.”

  
  
  


And in the bathtub, still cold and alone, but not quite so lonely, Matteo thinks about David’s hands. He thinks about the years he wasted. He thinks about the days and nights he spent high for months on end. He thinks about what he can never get back. He’ll never be a teen again. But neither will David, and in some morbid way, there’s some solace in it. Not being alone in it. 

And then there’s the little flame of hope again, this time wishing for better days.

  
  
  


Eventually Matteo gets to lay beside David in a bed all buttoned up. There’s a careful space between them because sometimes it’s so hard to be close to someone. It gets sweaty and warm and uncomfortable and you lose feeling on your arm and it’s rude to back off, to roll away to the other side of the bed. 

David has really beautiful lashes. It’s beautiful to be with him, as if for a second it’s just them, as if for a moment the world isn’t ending. 

“I was robbed out of a childhood I was supposed to have,” David says suddenly. 

“What do you mean?” 

“A male childhood, you know,” his voice shakes as he speaks, “It’s not only the teenage years I missed out on. I’m still trying to figure out who I am.” 

It’s a strange thing to hear, the last part. The idea that David, the confident, funny, cool David, doesn’t know who he is. He is so well rounded. It doesn’t really make sense. 

And Matteo wants to say something that matters, something that would make him feel less alone. 

“That’s so sad,” is all that comes out.

“Oh well. All we’ve got now is the future.”

Matteo isn’t sure why he speaks in the plural. But he thinks it matters. David could know more than he lets on, he seems to be like that, or something. Maybe it doesn’t matter. 

But somehow he gathers up the courage to take David’s hand and hold it. It’s warm. 

“All we’ve got now is the future,” he repeats.

“And it’ll be better. I’m speaking it into existence.”

Matteo tries his best to believe his words. A part of him seems to do so. 

  
  
  
  


He’ll never be a child again. Matteo wishes he could, just to crawl into his mother’s arms and make her love him in a way he understands. The closest he felt to her was when he once heard her sing in the shower. 

  
  
  
  


David’s hands fit so well around his waist. 

At one point, the world stopped ending. Matteo isn’t sure when it happened. But it did, which is the most important part. It isn’t easy, not to like in a constant chaos. Sadness is comfortable, getting high is comfortable. But being with David is beautiful. It should be enough. 

Matteo hopes it will be enough. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> mental illness is dumb and stupid and lets hope the future brings all of us better times. thanks for reading pls leave a comment and/or kudos ill die for u.


End file.
